Conducting Qualitative Research on Pedagogies for Scholarly Writing: Challenges and Strategies

Research on pedagogies relating to genre for scholarly writing is usually qualitative, as students’ understanding of genre knowledge can be examined only by an in-depth analysis of what students write, how they write it, and why they write it in this way. Such analysis is laborious, considering the number of student drafts, the nuanced differences between revisions, and the amount of work of transcribing and coding interviews/class observations. In addition, if researchers attempt to experiment with a new teaching approach, they often need to implement it themselves; in other words, they have to teach and collect data at the same time, not to mention they sometimes need to work with experts in other disciplines. In this presentation, using my research experiences as examples, I will share my challenges and how I deal with them (Huang, 2014, 2017). Based on the first study (Huang, 2014), I will talk about the problems I faced and how I resolved them when I tried to both conduct my research and teach students from a different discipline, such as switching roles of a researcher and a teacher, analyzing and assessing students’ drafts, and managing time and workload. Using the second study as an example (Huang, 2017), then, I will focus on how I dealt with the challenges of collaborating with experts in other disciplines, including recruiting potential participants and negotiating course design with them. These problems might often be encountered by researchers who conduct similar studies, but how these problems can be resolved are rarely publicized. By sharing these experiences, it is hoped that this presentation can help future researchers who are interested in researching genre-based pedagogies for scholarly writing when they run into similar difficulties.